


Chemical Madness

by overwhelmingly_contrary



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: F/M, Flappers, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Married Couple, Mental Breakdown, Schizophrenia, Unhealthy Relationships, Writers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-11 01:59:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7021111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/overwhelmingly_contrary/pseuds/overwhelmingly_contrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The illusive Daisy to his idealistic Gatsby. The flapper and the philosopher. Zelda and Scott.<br/>As she begins her descent into madness, he falls further and further into alcoholism, and their marriage of codependence threatens to destroy their world of rich jazz and booze.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chemical Madness

       The young-blood in Antibes had already started to cool come late August, with all the crisp white yachts blowing off to here and there like origami boats, and Scott was irritable. Hadley Hemingway had left in one of those paper boats, saying she didn’t expect that she’d be back until November and that Ernest had been wanting some rest from “all that goddamned rubbish” ever since the Murphys hosted for Zelda’s birthday.  
       “He just knows that he oughtn’t have had that much to drink,” Zelda had wanted to say. Why Sarah Murphy hadn’t cut him off before he was dancing on the patio with Gerald Murphy’s Pekinese was one of the summer’s hot topics. She thought Sarah was just tired of Ernest and wished he would fall off the balcony and take the silly Pekinese with him. Scott thought Zelda should shut up.  
       “If you had only kept that to yourself, Zelda. Sometimes it seems you don’t think properly about these things, about people.”  
       “Nobody likes you if you keep going on about something they’ve done and nobody likes you if you leave them and their business alone,” she had told him. “Gosh, wasn’t that clever, Scott?”  
       He’d only patted her head and murmured, “Not your best, darling”, then stalked out in search of Scottie.  
       But even little Scottie had been fractious. Zelda had been putting off seeing her in the afternoons, feeling that Nanny was much better with dealing with all those petty troubles of childhood and wasn’t that why she was paying her in the first place? Mothers were really only good for kissing plump white necks smothered in talcum powder and giving mints from nice enamel boxes when Nanny wasn’t looking. The irreproachable Murphys – so Scott had christened them – had a nanny too, she remembered. The last four afternoons that she had spent with Sarah on their terrace that summer had been routinely interrupted by either the nanny or the Pekinese and heaven only knew which was worse.  
       “Now Mrs. Murphy, don’t you think the children’s things should go in the steamer trunk, not the duffels?” the nanny, a bony Englishwoman, had suggested. Sarah had shrugged and let her carry on as she wished.  
       The Murphys too had left. “We couldn’t miss the winter season in Paris and there are a few good shows starting soon,” Gerald had explained cheerfully, and Zelda had pleaded with Scott, asking if they couldn’t go up to Paris too.  
       “I’m surprised at you, darling. After that mess you made with Ernest, I didn’t think we should go,” he’d said with studied carelessness and she hadn’t mentioned Paris again. Here at least, she didn’t have to share her husband’s attentions with Ernest. She would have him to herself all winter and then he could get started on a new book instead of boozing all over the good Lord’s creation in Paris.  
       “Besides, Scottie is getting on so well here, isn’t she?” Their daughter had told Scott, “I don’t really want to be in another book; the first one took you long enough!” Scott loved to tell that to the lovely younger set at parties and he and Ernest had almost come to blows as Ernest had said he didn’t think he could stand to hear about Gatsby or any other damn thing Scott had written one more time.  
       Those sorts of things had destroyed Scott. He would lay awake in their bed, vaguely drunk, and talk to her about his books and Ernest’s books and all the wonderful things he wanted to write about. Her husband said things more beautifully than any other man she knew, thought Zelda. Murmuring hoarsely as stiff breezes from the gulf buffeted and lifted their sheets, the window drapes, he spoke like that honest Carraway fellow who saw symbols and prophesies in billboards and the heavens alike. Gatsby was selling well, he thought, although the publishers at Scribners had wired him that he might want to start on something else and take advantage of Gatsby’s success while he could.  
       “It would be like Daisy leaving him dead all over again, the poor bastard, if I were to publish again so soon. Zelda, when one is a writer, one feels these things with such conviction that it’s as if you are frightened for your immortal soul should you abandon a book. And Gatsby? He’s miserable enough as it is.”  
       When he had explained it like that, Zelda found she couldn’t give a damn about needing more money for clothes, just as long as Scott was happy. Times like those, she would have agreed with anything he said, even if he had declared that they should overthrow the King of England and paint Parliament pink.

  
                                                                                                             ……….

  
       Of course, Ernest’s books hadn’t been half as successful as Gatsby already was. That ass of a man knew it too and it made him testy as the devil himself. Even as toasts were being raised to Zelda’s health and happiness at the Murphy’s party, he had mentioned his book, something about a soldier. She had snorted, champagne going up her nose. If a bulldog had been given the power of speech, she was sure it would have sounded like Ernest. Good gosh, he even wrote like a bulldog, terse and worrying one point until you could hardly make out what it was meant to be.  
       “How is your book doing though, Mr. Hemingway?” she had asked. “I know I’ve heard so much about it. Must be something that’s paying for all that tequila.” And she snorted again, wanting Scott to be there so he could hear her and how clever she was. Ernest was going on about something in his bulldog voice but Zelda hardly listened. She had caught sight of Scott as he threw back his head of tawny curls and downed another highball and she scrambled onto a chair, teetering on her heels and waving wildly. “Scott! Scott! Great Scott!”  
       “Now I think you should listen to what Mr. Hemingway was saying,” she giggled confidentially into his shoulder. “Something about the poor taste of the American public for the sensational rather than the sensible? All a lot of talk, as far as crazy me could make out.”  
Scott was vague and distracted. “Not now, Zelda,” he said. “Can’t you understand that this isn’t the time for that?”

  
                                                                                                            ……….

  
       That must have all been weeks ago now, since the Hemingways were gone and even the Murphys were long gone and Scott was finally starting on a new book. Though the midsummer weeks after her birthday, he had kept himself locked in his study and she had kept to the beach where she would swim out almost as far as the fishing boats, coral and vermillion hulls and sunburnt Frenchmen at their leisure under the bright sky. There was infinite possibility for her out in the sea, a sort of promise that all things will change and yet remain as they had always been and always will be, the comforting complexity of the world taking on her own troubles. “A new day for us all, except Scott,” she thought. Scott remembered things and kept them hoarded away in his writer’s mind, only letting them escape as written words, his own catharsis which she was not allowed to be a part of.  
       So instead she floated out in the water, far beyond Scottie and Nanny’s laughter on the yellow beach, far from Scott’s study where he reinvented their history as fiction. Nothing kept her from remembering what had happened to them, especially at her birthday party, but the swimming and the small white pills at night helped for a time.

  
                                                                                                           ……….

  
       “Not now, Zelda,” he had said, but she couldn’t stop herself. She had mentioned Gatsby then and Ernest slapped her.  
       Her glass had slipped and broken with a soft tinkle of glass on Sarah Murphy’s floor and the low rumble of the saxophone in the band overwhelmed her ears in the wake of the slap. Gerald Murphy was gliding over, murmuring apologies to his guests and Hadley looked vaguely embarrassed, sinking further into the corner where she had spent the whole evening. Many more partygoers and members of their new expatriate elite were shuffling about them in their filmy evening dresses and pearls and dark suits with soft leather shoes, but it was only Scott that mattered now. She turned to him.  
       Lights and smoke and the vibrations of that damned saxophone slipped between them. and warped the space as it seemed one moment a matter of mere inches, the next a chasm. “Dear Lord, dear Scott, say something,” she prayed.  
       He looked only briefly at her before lighting a cigarette and turning away and towards the patio.  
       Gerald did something after that to distract the guests from it all, the magic trick of a practiced host, and Zelda slowly unclenched her jaw. All the condescending glances and picking of sides — she had no patience for all of it and found she couldn’t bear to face it without Scott by her side, laughing quietly at the rest of the world as he became increasingly more intoxicated.  
      “Scott Fitzgerald, you know that old scribbler of course. He’s read it. Says it’s first rate, not that he’d know.” Earnest was still speaking loudly to a pair of young dancers about his damned book in his bulldog voice, obviously reveling in their admiration.

       Scott never came to bed that night and so she put herself to sleep with two of her white pills and a teacup full of scotch.  
     


End file.
